| Plato's dialogues present the reader with a hermeneutic challenge: they are works of philosophy, which contain decidedly poetic elements (i.e., dramatic setting, narrative, myth, imagery, allegory, etc.). However, the dominant philosophical interpretive orientation toward Plato, i.e., Platonism, fails to account adequately for the dialogical form in which Plato wrote, focusing on the dialogues' "philosophical" content. The Platonist orientation is dominant both within academic scholarship within Philosophy Departments, as well as in the academy at large, and in the archetypal image of Plato that has been passed down through tradition. Platonism's least supportable claim is to that of Plato's authorship; because Plato is a "philosopher" and his dialogues, "philosophy," they must therefore be the expression of his ideas, beliefs, and teachings. However, when one attends to the dialogical form of his writing, the question of Plato's authorship becomes, itself, questionable.;In this dissertation, I attempt to offer what I call a spiritual hermeneutics of the Republic. A spiritual hermeneutics is an orientation toward the dialogue that takes seriously, as an essential piece of Plato's philosophy, his poetry, in the service of disrupting our Platonist tendencies, and with the hope to reveal a Plato, whose dialogues are oriented more toward provoking spiritual realization in their readers than in espousing Plato's own theories. My interpretive approach is to read the dialogue as it was written, i.e., attending to the course of its organic, dramatic unfolding, we learn how to read the dialogue; it teaches the reader how to read it. In this way, each dialogue would need to be read on its own. I do not here develop a hermeneutic theory. Rather, this dissertation is something of a demonstration of spiritual hermeneutics, which reveals itself, in a manner similar to the dialogue, as that hermeneutic unfolds. |
